“It’s difficult to capture birds in flight,” said Andrew Zuckerman, in an interview with Weather.com. So rather than battling the elements with these flyers, the photographer and filmmaker literally removed from his pictures all nature but the subjects themselves.

The result, captured in his third book Bird, provides intimate portraits of 75 species on a stark white background.

Zuckerman certainly has nothing against nature. Quite the opposite, in fact. His aim with the bird photos — as well as those he shot for Creature, Flower and other similar projects — was to distill them down to what he describes as their most essential qualities. “If the images [of birds in flight] exist, they’re usually taken from a distance or obscured by the environmental context,” he said. “I really wanted to…catalog as many species as I could access in a totally neutral space.”

There’s also a preservationist impulse, he added, “the desire to index, to create a document of the natural world, which is of course at risk.” He’s referring to threats like climate change.

Renowned designer Massimo Vignelli (who created, among other things, the famous New York City subway map) compared Zuckerman’s works to John James Audubon’s paintings. “Birds have been drawn, painted and photographed by many artists, but no one has reached the purity of Audubon’s drawings and watercolors,” he wrote in the introduction to Bird. “Until now.” Audubon offered context in his works, Vignelli continued. A pair of cardinals on a berry-filled branch, for example. Zuckerman offers the bird’s silhouette alone.